Floor 19-B

Floor 19-B is a subordinate landing inserted between Floor 18 and Floor 20, occupying the half-flight of the north stairwell customarily assigned to Floor 19 and leased from it in perpetuity under Concordance 212, Annex 6. It has no name in any register, no independent access from the shaft, and no holdings of its own excepting a single locked cabinet and the surviving copies of its own correspondence. It is, by the reckoning of the Office of Vertical Survey, the only floor in the Tower whose entire archive is smaller than its stair head.

Origin and status

The landing was created in the winter of the year the Survey calls 3,411, when masons widening the north stair between Floor 18 and Floor 20 could not agree on whether the new treads fell within the boundary of the upper or the lower floor. Rather than strike the work, the Survey recorded the disputed half-flight as a distinct address and let the question of tenure stand open. The standing has never closed. Concordance 212 holds that the landing is a dependent of Floor 19; the forty-ninth recension of the boundary schedules holds that it is a servitude upon Floor 18; and a marginal note in the Survey's own day-book, initialled by the clerk on duty and never rescinded, holds that the landing "is neither, and may be entered by anyone who has not asked."

In practice the Survey treats 19-B as addressable but not assessable. Its width is recorded once, in the day-book, as eleven and a half paces at the top of the tread and twelve at the bottom, and the entry is annotated provisional in a hand different from the one that wrote the measurements. The discrepancy has been raised at four hearings of the Committee on Interior Boundaries and resolved each time by adjourning the matter to the following winter.

The cabinet and the watch

The landing's cabinet — iron, two locks, one of them without a key — was placed there by the Bureau of Deferred Property and has never been opened on the record. Its contents are listed in a single line of the Bureau's inventory: "provisions as deposited, 3,411." Two attempts have been made to verify the deposit, the second in the year 4,002 by the verifying clerk Mireille Ostand, whose report to Floor 1,207 survives in extract:

"The cabinet is sound, the upper lock operable, the lower lock not. As to whether the floor beneath the cabinet belongs to Floor 18 or to Floor 19 I make no finding, being instructed to verify contents and not tenure, and being unable to verify contents."

— Mireille Ostand, report to the verification floor, 4,002

Because the landing cannot be assigned to either floor for the purposes of the Schedule of Standing Watches, the watch upon it has fallen since 3,412 to whichever porter reaches it first on the morning round. The arrangement is called the rotation and is not a rotation. The porter Halven Coot held the watch for thirty-one consecutive years by the expedient of beginning his round at the bottom and running, a practice forbidden under Concordance 87 as it applies to stairs above the eighth landing but never charged against him. Following Coot's retirement the watch has changed hands on average eleven times a year.

The dispute of 3,908

The most serious recorded incident on 19-B occurred in the winter of 3,908, when the porters of Floor 18 and the porters of Floor 19 arrived on the landing on the same morning to sweep it, each party acting under its own floor's standing instruction. The dispute was not resolved by argument. It was resolved by the discovery that the two parties had swept from opposite ends toward the middle and that the resulting heap of dust had been divided in the proportions six to four, which both parties accepted as evidence of a shared obligation and neither party was willing to contest, since contesting it would require a survey.

A plaque commemorating the division was affixed to the stair head. The plaque records the proportions correctly and the year incorrectly, and the error has been permitted to stand on the reasoning that correcting it would require a survey.

Access and prohibitions

19-B is reached by the north stair, four treads above the eighteenth-floor landing, and is not marked. Visitors are asked not to loiter at the top of the flight, as the tread is the only means of passing between Floor 18 and Floor 20 and a person standing on it constitutes a blockage under the general stair rules. Carrying a lit lamp up the flight is permitted; carrying it down is not, the descent being the one on which the draft runs.

Holdings

The floor's surviving archive, kept in a press below the stair head by courtesy of Floor 19, comprises:

• the day-book of 3,411, one volume, water-damaged at the gutter;
• the boundary schedules and their recensions, in copy;
• the plaque's original draft, which gives a third ratio, since abandoned;
• correspondence of the Bureau of Deferred Property, 3,411–3,414, unopened.

Readers wishing to consult the press should apply to Floor 19 and should not be surprised to be sent to Floor 18.